Poppy 0.0.0.8i

I've just finished writing a new 'Stocks and Shares' module for Poppy. Now you can receive e-mail notifications for your portfolio! The module isn't available for download yet although it should be making an appearance in the CVS soon.

UPDATE: Also in the works is an RSS module. It supports RSS 0.91 and 2.0 at the moment and is looking good.

I have spent some time working on the planned Hotmail module and I am sorry to say that the news is not all good. There appears to be an issue with the cookie management that prevents us from completing the final login step. However I am pleased to announce that sometime very soon we shall be importing the code into CVS. Thanks for reading.

Welcome to the new look Poppy project homepage. It's amazing what SSI and CSS will do for you! The webpage has been reorganised under the hood in order to make it easier (but not easy) to submit news updates. I think some Bash scripting may be in order...

In other news there has even been some download activity! If any of you brave downloaders have managed to get your Poppy installation up and running then I'd very much like to hear from you. Over and out.

With a first ever Sourceforge release today presents something of a milestone in both my career and Poppy's development cycle. So I proudly present Poppy 0.0.0.8 revision `i`. Most of the planned feature set has been implemented and I now propose a pause in the development cycle to enable code tidy-up and bug fixing. Here is a rundown of the known problems that will at some future point in time need attention,

• The module loading code is a little problematic. If the resources for an individual module are missing then the whole application exits.
• The 'Server-SessionLimit' setting does absolutely nothing. It would only take a couple of lines to implement but doing so would be a missed opportunity. At present, POP3Sessions provide the Poppy server with no information whatsoever, but if at a later date I decide to implement a Listener interface then this missing feature would naturally fall into place, along with the possibility of activity logging.
• There are no sanity checks currently being performed on the 'WebmailModule-MessageFilter' setting. This lets the daft situation arise when you can define a filter akin to `aA` (which means download webmail messages that have attachments that do not have attachments, savvy?).
• Developers, the Hotmail module is currently a joke. Malformed login cookies are the first outstanding issue to be dealt with but also the module needs some restructuring. At the moment it *just* compiles and that is the extent of it.

Mr Postman is pretty good, why did you essentially reinvent the wheel with Poppy?

I liked the general idea of Mr Postman but I thought it could be done differently, more compactly and with increased simplicity. Whether I have or have not attained these goals if of course down to you...

Why does Poppy come with a POP3 module?

A POP3 server that needs a module to talk to POP3 servers? What kind of madness is this? When I started writing Poppy (or POPTart as I then named it) I didn't have a the faintest idea how any of the webmail services worked (and to be honest I still don't) so I needed a module with which to test the fledgling server. With the RFC1939 document right in front of me at my desk a POP3 module seemed obvious. To be honest I also had grander plans for my API (which have since been scaled down) and I intended to put it to use in a protocol independent mail client and a POP3 plugin would have been necessary. It's now been included for posterity, and also because it attempts to do APOP logins which Outlook Express when left to it's own devices won't.

What does the future hold for Poppy?

To a greater or lesser extent the future of Poppy depends on the writing of modules. I currently don't have time to write anymore; for the interested developer I consider the Yahoo! module an example to follow. Poppy currently lacks any activity monitoring/logging and the POP3 errors provided are pretty useless. I hope to implement these things in the future, but by future I mean sometime between immediately and never, I suppose when also depends somewhat on the level of interest.

The Yahoo! module should now be multilingual, those of you whose first language isn't English please feel free to test it a little. Contrary to what is stated below the username should not include @yahoo.com (and so on). There should now no longer be a delay on logging out from the server, please note that this breaks the RFC1939(POP3) specification and the 'Threaded Logout' feature most likely will become an option at a later date. The server configuration has improved slightly, but it's early days yet. You can now specify the port number and whether or not the server will accept connections from remote clients.

I've posted two links above. One is a work in progress snapshot of my project directory the other is a Windows installer. Be warned, at the moment the installer isn't fully complete and it does not yet install the modules at all. I expect to complete it within the next week or so. For developers my IDE of choice is JCreator LE 3.0. As these are work in progress releases I ask you NOT to post bugs on sourceforge. Here is a list of known issues with the "0.0.0.8" series:

• The configuration of the server from a text file is only partially complete. The major deficiencies being that the server is currently hardwired to port 110 and can only accept connections from the localhost.
• The package rwbrown.mail.web is still embryonic, again the major deficiencies are in the configuration department. This in the main effects the Yahoo! plugin, it can currently only download 350 messages a session, offers no means with which to filter messages and will always empty the bulk and trash folders on exit. There is also a time penalty incurred during log out. I plan to extend the aforementioned package to make these features available to the Yahoo! module without having to modify the module itself.
• Both the Yahoo! and Hotmail modules are based on their Mr Postman equivalents. The Yahoo! module has come on quite nicely but the Hotmail one is currently rather broken. Both modules will require the JCookie library in order to work.
• Documentation, in either end-user or developer form, is non-existent. This may take some time to appear. The basic gist is as follows. Use your e-mail client to create a new account, set the POP3 server to localhost (127.0.0.1) set the port to 110, set your username to yahoo:your yahoo e-mail address and the password to your Yahoo! password.
• If the modules aren't installed properly with all necessary libraries present Poppy will abruptly exit on start-up. I am looking into this but essentially the JVM throws a runtime error and there's not a lot I can do about that.
• A correct functioning installation of the Sun JVM 1.4 or later is required.

The Poppy POP3 Proxy Server has been working quite well for almost nigh on 10 months. I have a couple of plugins written for it and they seem to work fine. I shall shortly be placing zipped work in progress archives here for download and testing. However, there are a few changes and outstanding to do items that need to be completed before I consider a release. They are (1) Get the server to process its configuration file - at the moment it can't find it! (2) Extend the API so that it can handle configuration objects properly - this is mainly for the benefit of webmail based modules (3) Consider removing classes from the API and/or server that are better implemented in the java.* packages - to be precise the MailURL interface (4) Fix the knock on effects of item 3.

If any developers are interested in writing plugins then contact me through sourceforge.